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The Thing that can Do Everything


My daughter has this toy. Actually it is what remains of a toy. She calls it “the thing that can do everything”. Many happy hours, for both child and mom, have been wiled away with this green rubber stretchy thing.  She engaged in games that only a four year old could find enthralling while mom was happily accomplishing ……. well, okay, I wasn’t accomplishing  a damn thing but I was happily not doing so.

Like most preschoolers my daughter can derive more pleasure from packaging of all kinds and tennis balls she finds in the park than from the abundance of toys she owns. She has a green set of fairy wings and a pink plastic wand that  inspire her to make up stories and burst into song like a Disney character. But the “thing that can do everything” is a true wonder toy. Even in its diminished state, it is capable of wondrous achievements. It has been a bath toy, a slingshot and the centerpiece of innumerable games. It flies. It ties. It dances. In conjunction with the pink wand, it made the rain go away one day.

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had such a toy? A thing that could do everything? But of course we do, it’s just that as we age we stop using it. Our imaginations give way to reality and logic and allows itself to be grounded the tyrannous rule of the majority who dictate the possible to us. What would happen, I wonder, if we wore pink wings and burst into song every once in a while? Do you think we could make the rain go away?

Shelter Belts



Winters on the prairie  were brutal for the early pioneers. During snowstorms a person could get lost just walking from the house to the barn and back again. In order to protect themselves homesteaders would plant trees and shrubs of various types around the buildings and as they grew they would form natural wind breaks. These shelter belts are still very common in rural areas in the U.S. and Canada. Driving through North Dakota we saw quite a few of these belts surrounding homes and farm buildings. Some were so thick that you couldn’t even see the house and buildings there were protecting and others were obviously still in their inceptions or had been reduced by time and weather.

I got to thinking that these shelter belts are not really unlike what we do in our own lives to shield ourselves from hurts and disasters. Instead of trees though we use the people around us. Some of these people chance placed in our lives through the accident known as birth but many others are chosen. Through deliberate acquisition and lucky timing we place these people around ourselves in the hopes that when the brutal emotional times come we will be protected and supported.

But, when death claims one of the members of our shelter belt, we are less able to bear the brunt of the storm that follows. We are like the homesteaders of bygone times, stringing up rope from building to building and pulling ourselves through the emotional blizzards. A lost member of the belt cannot really be replaced. It takes time to patch the whole in our shelter system and even when we find someone new to stand in the place of the fallen, they will not be the same. Just like a newly planted tree takes time to grow and fill out, a new person in our circle will need time as well, but they will take on a different shape just as a new tree would.

Florists and Funerals


Did you know that in the Yellow Pages the listings for Funerals is right after the listings for Florists? I didn’t either until I was looking for a florist for the wedding and the pages stuck together and there I was looking at an ad for simple cremations. The joys of duality. And now my neck, which was already sore from another day of hauling totes to their new home in the basement, is throbbing and my head hurts.

It’s not that you don’t expect to be caught off guard but that the nature of being caught off guard is exactly that. You are caught and there isn’t much you can do but deal. I get tired of dealing though because it is not like these moments come up in ordinary time. I don’t think about Will when I am getting breakfast for Katy or eating toast or making the beds or any number of things I do throughout the day. They come at moments when you are happy and moving farther away from them. The memories. Sometimes I wonder if they are just trying to remind you of their existence in much the same way that toddlers insist that their parents stay within sight at all times.

Not everything brings them back and often they are not painful. When Rob was picking out his tux for the wedding he asked for my opinion on every item from the style to the cufflinks and I could recall Will simply selecting everything while I browsed through a giant book of invitation selections. It was just a recollection triggered by the circumstances. Carried no real emotional weight though. Even today’s Yellow Page moment wasn’t fraught with heavy thoughts. It was more of an…aw shit, again? Because I want my moments now as moments now. Not connected to the past. And that is not possible. We are a sum of our moments

There is a song in Act II of the Sondheim musical Into the Woods where the Baker’s Wife is thinking about her “moment in the woods” and she sings,

Ah, if life were only moments

Even now and then a bad one

But if life were only moments

Then you’d never know you had one

And I guess that is it. Life is a continuum  of memories. The good, the bad and the merely annoying me when I would rather not be.